(21) From the weakness of our senses we are not able to judge the truth.
(21a) What appears is a vision of the unseen.
(21b) (We can make use of the lower animals) because we use our own experience and memory and wisdom and art.
(22) What is called “birds’ milk” is the white of the egg.
Anaxagoras and his predecessors.
127. The system of Anaxagoras, like that of Empedokles, aimed at reconciling the Eleatic doctrine that corporeal substance is unchangeable with the existence of a world which everywhere presents the appearance of coming into being and passing away. The conclusions of Parmenides are frankly accepted and restated. Nothing can be added to all things; for there cannot be more than all, and all is always equal (fr. [5]). Nor can anything pass away. What men commonly call coming into being and passing away is really mixture and separation (fr. [17]).
This last fragment reads almost like a prose paraphrase of Empedokles (fr. [9]); and it is in every way probable that Anaxagoras derived his theory of mixture from his younger contemporary, whose poem was most likely published before his own treatise.[[687]] We have seen how Empedokles sought to save the world of appearance by maintaining that the opposites—hot and cold, moist and dry—were things, each one of which was real in the Parmenidean sense. Anaxagoras regarded this as inadequate. Everything changes into everything else,[[688]] the things of which the world is made are not “cut off with a hatchet” (fr. [8]) in this way. On the contrary, the true formula must be: There is a portion of everything in everything (fr. [11]).
“Everything in everything.”
128. A part of the argument by which Anaxagoras sought to prove this point has been preserved in a corrupt form by Aetios, and Diels has recovered some of the original words from the scholiast on St. Gregory Nazianzene. “We use a simple nourishment,” he said, “when we eat the fruit of Demeter or drink water. But how can hair be made of what is not hair, or flesh of what is not flesh?” (fr. [10]).[[689]] That is just the sort of question the early Milesians must have asked, only the physiological interest has now definitely replaced the meteorological. We shall find a similar train of reasoning in Diogenes of Apollonia (fr. 2).
The statement that there is a portion of everything in everything, is not to be understood as referring simply to the original mixture of things before the formation of the worlds (fr. [1]). On the contrary, even now “all things are together,” and everything, however small and however great, has an equal number of “portions” (fr. [6]). A smaller particle of matter could only contain a smaller number of portions, if one of those portions ceased to be; but if anything is, in the full Parmenidean sense, it is impossible that mere division should make it cease to be (fr. [3]). Matter is infinitely divisible; for there is no least thing, any more than there is a greatest. But however great or small a body may be, it contains just the same number of “portions,” that is, a portion of everything.